-
JUNE 7. MARKS
- University of Iowa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
90 MAY 30. HUNTING AND GATHERING Today at Torah Study we were reading that Jews are allowed to eat deer and gazelle, but not sacrifice them. Gazelle, said Stan, that’s the original Jewish fast food. JUNE 2. LOUTS I got off the L yesterday afternoon after the Cubs game let out and the neighborhood was littered, as usual, with drunken and drunkenseeming louts. I was walking behind some on the sidewalk and then in front of them. I could hear them talking about the message on my head: us out of iraq Oh, said one, I gotta put my glasses on to read that. Out? Pull out? That’s what my girlfriend says, I can’t pull out. We gotta stay in there. We gotta really go in there with soldiers and stay. We can’t pull out. We gotta push. Etc., etc. When I walked in my gate and went up the porch steps I turned and waved. Later I went with Barry to see a Brecht play up the street. Because he’s in a scooter, we were on the first row. The theater was small and almost packed, the second night, with at least one big critic there. It was loud and intense, much screaming. Cartoonish. Polemical. Typical Brecht. Some good acting. Finally it ended. We went out. In the little lobby the Big Critic was talking to some people. On the sidewalk there were about 15 people smoking, including at least one of the actors. There was a static-ness, not a rush to leave. About two hours later, reading about the play on the Internet, I realized there were scenes we didn’t see. We’d left at halftime. Both Barry and I see live theater at least every other month. Between us we must have seen thousands of performances. And there hadn’t been a curtain call, after all. But with Barry’s spaciness from his MS and with my chemo brain, we missed the obvious. We were louts. JUNE 7. MARKS Monday night I talked on the phone to Jodi, my actor friend in Madison , who reported on her performance at a benefit to raise money to 91 build a Gilda’s Club there. She used me for source material. She had one of her personas tell the crowd that she had a friend who’d hennaed her head to say Obama in ’08. She explained to me that us Out of Iraq would be too political. You’d think that all of Madison would be against the war, but Jodi knows her audience. It’s a sign of progress that supporting a liberal biracial man for president is considered noncontroversial. But what does it say about the chances for this war to end? I was standing in line at Emerald City a while ago when one of the other denizens, a cop, asked me why my message didn’t say, Support Your Local Police. I demurred: Too many words. He has thick gray hair with a receding hairline. He said that his scalp has a tattoo that says us Marine Corps. He was young and drunk at the time of the tattooing. How odd to think that his history will be revealed, slowly, if he goes bald, his own personal archeology. JUNE 10. LUMP My internist had felt a lump in my (former) left breast in August and told me then to get an ultrasound, but the last time she’d sent me for an ultrasound, the radiologist had found nothing and moreover had pooh-poohed internists as alarmists, so I didn’t do anything. I had an appointment with my Boyish Gyne soon after and asked him to check it. He said it didn’t feel like anything. Today I had an appointment with him to check out my fibroids. I had imagined making a dramatic announcement: Remember that lump you said was nothing? Well (whipping open the hospital gown and letting the silence be eloquent ) . . . He walked in with the motto on his lips of All Doctors Who Know You Have Cancer: Are you hanging in there? It’s quite apt but gets tiresome. He did an endometrial biopsy just to make sure there wasn’t another cause for my bleeding, such as endometrial dysplasia, a precancerous condition. I didn’t have the guts to say, Are you sorry you missed the lump? But I did make reference to the lump, and later he said he was...